Foreign cars: issue 7

In the twentieth century, Russia suffered more than any other European country. But while Germany, for example, learned to face the dark side of its past, Russian society never truly comprehended its own dramatic history.

Catherine Merridale asks how the impermanent past is reflected in everyday life, in our expectations, our dreams and nightmares. One of the main characters in "Stone Night" is Lenin's body. The main theme of the book is death: the space of death in the Soviet Union, death as an integral part of Soviet discourse. Death as a value.

The material on which the book is based can be divided into two large parts. Firstly, research into pre-revolutionary archives, Soviet propaganda texts, memoirs, letters, newspapers, fiction, and works on psychiatry. Secondly, interviews with doctors, priests, social workers, police officers, gravediggers and cemetery directors. How total, permeating all spheres of life (and death) was state violence during the Soviet era? How do today's Russians rewrite their history, what rites and rituals survived the Soviet system, and what do they indicate in relation to the current Russian identity?

The book will go on sale March 8, 2001.

Kirill Kutalov-Postoll

The Scotsman Alasdair Gray, familiar to us from the novel “The Wretched Poor,” this time acts not as a prose writer, but as a compiler. Gray believes that author's introductions can provide the reader with at least one of four pleasures. Firstly, the preface is the most suitable genre for the author to tell a little about himself and, thanks to this, be on friendly terms with us in the future. Secondly, it is in the preface that the author gets the chance to deal critics either a preemptive strike or a counter-strike (if the book comes out in a second or even nth edition). Thirdly, the author has the right to share his views on the state of the modern world, and these views can be either benevolent (Walt Whitman) or quite the opposite (Karl Marx). Fourthly, sometimes the author simply vents his soul on his fellow writers or translators, and the arrows he shoots often fly across eras and strike those who no longer care about anything.

All four pleasures can be obtained by reading a collection of the author's prefaces to English and American editions, composed from 675 to 1920 AD. The upper chronological limit is explained simply: prefaces written after 1921 are subject to copyright law and must be paid for reprinting. But even without the participation of modern authors, the book contains a lot of interesting things: Mark Twain, defending the appropriateness of the use of southern dialectisms in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Lewis Carroll, anticipating critics’ reproaches for the absurdity of “The Hunting of the Snark,” and much more.

“The Book of Prefaces” is not a hastily compiled collection, but a painstakingly compiled anthology - work on it lasted 16 years - with a huge number of comments. (Let us remember how successful “The Ideal Novel” still enjoys. But it is just fiction...) In essence, this is a kind of history of literature from “Beowulf” to Bernard Shaw - history in prefaces and author’s annotations. And since no one ever reads prefaces (although every time he promises himself to return to them later), Gray's anthology is an excellent opportunity to catch up.

Kirill Kutalov-Postoll

Julian Barnes is known in Russia primarily as the author of the novel “ The History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters ” (translated by V. Babkov; see also here , here and here ). “Flaubert's Parrot” and “Porcupine” were also published - apparently, the Russian reader (and even more so the editor) was pleased that a major English prose writer dedicated an entire novel to an abstract Slavic socialist country (the key word is “socialist”). Both are natural: after all, in the West, Barnes is also best known as the author of “The History of the World”; This book, published a decade ago, managed to get on the lists of required reading in literature departments of many universities.

Meanwhile, most of Barnes’s works have not been translated into Russian (which is a pity, since they are translated into all major European languages), and we, of course, believe that he is one of the best living prose writers of the English-speaking world, but check whether he supports he has this reputation - we can’t.

And Barnes, in addition to “Flaubert’s Parrot,” “History of the World” and “Porcupine,” wrote the novel of education “Metroland” and the monstrous novel-study of jealousy “Before We Meet” (this is one of the most depressing books I have ever come across) , a collection of stories about Anglo-French relations “Across the English Channel” (excerpts were published in “Foreigner” ), a dystopia “England, England” (the list is incomplete, I list only what I read myself). And - two novels that have now formed into a duology: Talking It Over (1991; I refuse to translate the title) and Love, etc., which was released at the end of the summer of this year. (and here the translation is given not simply, but according to the context - “With love, etc.”).

(It is interesting to note that the French, who dearly love Barnes for his love for France, so atypical for an Englishman, at one time made a film based on the novel Talking It Over, which was called Love, etc. (in honor of one of the chapters of the first novel). In the film everything was Frenchized, and the French mother of the main character turned into an Englishwoman, which looked terribly stupid; in addition, the filmmakers decided to add an epilogue to the novel, the action of which took place exactly ten years later: in relation to the time of the creation of the film - in the future. that Barnes and the French clearly thought differently.)

This is probably a unique case in world fiction - a novel about ten years later was written ten years later. During this time, the characters grew up, matured, aged - choose any verb - inside the author. But we are not used to literary heroes really, like real people, changing over the ten years of their lives (really lived - we read about them back in the day). Therefore, the placement of accents in Love, etc. It's almost shocking at first.

Love, etc. - sequel novel. He doesn't hide it, he rather flaunts it. He is extremely unfriendly towards those who have not read Talking It Over. That is, you can read it and the general impression will be correct, but you won’t understand the fabric of time, you won’t feel it. And I have a strong impression that this is why the second book was written.

Both books, if we reduce the plot to one of those 28 (or how many there are) archetypes that make up any plot, are about a love triangle. And the characters in them are the same: one woman, two men. Only the roles between them are distributed differently. This is what is shocking.

It's not that in the first book there is one - first the husband, then the ex-husband; the other is first an admirer, then also a husband, and in the second - on the contrary, or maybe not, nothing ends there anyway, and it doesn’t matter. The fact is that in Talking It Over one character (Oliver) is brilliant, witty, educated, touching; the other (Stewart) is standard, boring, faded, narrow-minded. Of course, Barnes is not the kind of author to paint each of his characters with the same brush; Of course, anyone understands how many complexes ring behind Oliver’s eloquence, and how difficult Stuart’s mental life really is, and how subtle some of his observations are. But still, everything is predetermined. Even professions. Stewart is a bank employee; Oliver is a freelance artist. What questions might there be?

It turns out that there may be questions. They have been accumulating all these ten years. And now we see a rather scary picture. We see Oliver, who hasn't changed one bit. And Stuart, who is unrecognizable.

Oliver is over forty and still flaunts words that can only be found in the unabridged Oxford Dictionary. He also searches for work randomly and unsuccessfully. In the same way, only with greater force, he falls into depression. I don't even feel sorry for him. Did we really love him so much in the first book? Did she really love him? Does he still love her?

And - what is the secret of Stewart's transformation? Yes, this is undoubtedly the same person; but where did his charm, charisma, wisdom, and masculine attractiveness come from? ( “You’ve lost weight,” his ex-wife tells him. “Thank you ,” he replies, “ usually old acquaintances say that I’ve turned grey.” ) Is it the case that he is wealthy, and his rival is begging? Is it because he plays sports and Oliver shudders at the thought of it? Is it because he is passionate about his work, but Oliver has nothing to do? Barnes doesn't make things easy for himself: Stewart is a tenacious businessman who learned capitalism after years in the States; he owns a chain of health food stores; For the English reader, these are all completely dubious recommendations, and even more so for the Russian reader. But whatever one may say, it turns out that he is a winner, and Oliver is a loser. Not by the quality of suits and watches, not by the size of the bank account, but by inner feeling, by self-esteem.

There can be any number of reasons for this, but neither individually nor together they explain anything. But I want to explain something to myself. Because if everything is as Barnes describes, then do you need to urgently, before it’s too late, give up your free-lance art and become a bank employee, otherwise by the age of forty you’ll turn into this?..

Apparently, not everything is so straightforward. It's just that some people change and some don't. And a real sequel (“continuation”) can only exist at the expense of the first. Otherwise it will be a repeat of Die Hard 2.

But we, in fact, will not begin to look for moral lessons in the novel now, we are no longer children. And what kind of lesson is this - “you need to change”, it won’t teach anyone anything, it’s either given or not. In Love, etc. there is a very subtle and potentially difficult to translate counterpoint to the main theme. The mother of the main character, as already mentioned, is French; and over these ten years she began to speak English worse. Sharp Gallic sense, worldly wisdom - everything is with her; but the language became a little more foreign, a little more constrained. Is every change good?

Barnes stopped Talking It Over mid-sentence and kept a pause for almost ten years. Love, etc. ends even more abruptly, and this causes extreme frustration: is there really no resolution? Why was there a need to fence the garden?

Maybe in order to write the final part of the trilogy in ten years?